It's Kids vs. Parking Lot in Battle Over Play Space for Peck Slip School

A Peck Slip School student and the parking lot entrance-exit across the street from the school. The operators of the lot have rejected the use of the street for play during the day and are said to want to reopen it during drop-off and pick-up times. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

A play street for the Peck Slip School has hit a dead end.

During the summer, school staff and parents had high hopes of giving their children the fresh air and freedom of outdoor play on the cobblestones of Peck Slip, a one-block stretch between Pearl and Water streets outside the one-year-old school building. Principal Maggie Siena had sounded the alarm that, even with a third of its expected student population, the school had run out of play space on its roof yard. Kindergartners, third- and fourth-graders must now alternate weekly between between the roof-top play yard and the cacophonous gym for recess.

There appeared to be a solution: Allow the school to have a Play Street on Peck Slip, part of a city program that allows schools and communities to close streets to traffic and turn them into recreational space. It was a plan last summer that had the support of Community Board 1 and the local merchant organization, the Old Seaport Alliance.

But two weeks before the school year began this month, Siena got word from the Department of Transportation that the application had been rejected. A parking lot facing the school, which has the smaller of its two entrance-exits on Peck Slip, had objected. “DOT won’t move forward until the parking lot agrees to the street closure,” principal Maggie Siena said, “and they aren’t returning anyone’s calls.”

Last year, the school received permission from the DOT to close the street at drop-off and pick-up for a total of four hours.

In an Aug. 12 letter to Community Board 1, lawyer Ross Moskowitz said his unnamed client—referring to the client as “a neighbor of the Peck Slip School”—has “grave concerns” about the Play Street. He cited the impact to traffic, children’s safety and local businesses. It was only later that the board learned that it was Laz Parking that he was representing.

Calls to Moskowitz and Robert Correa, regional manager of Laz Parking, were not returned.

Luis Sanchez, the DOT’s Manhattan Borough Commissioner, told the Trib on Sept. 22 that there is nothing his agency can do. With legal curb cuts at entrance-exits on Peck Slip and Pearl Street, “it’s really up to the parking lot.”

On Monday morning, Sept. 26, a Trib reporter spoke to Siena, the principal, in front of the school as she prepared to ring the bell to start the day.

“It only gets worse,” she said of the street dispute. Even the current use of Peck Slip for the assembly of children before school, and pickup after school, is now threatened, she said.

“Their attorney [representing Laz Parking] came over and said his client is very upset about the morning and afternoon closure and went to the DOT and said we didn’t get permission for this.” According to Siena, Sanchez expressed surprise that the school had not received the parking lot’s permission for the twice daily closures. (“I’m assuming they [received the permission] because they’ve been doing it for the past year,” Sanchez had told the Trib.)

Siena said it did not occur to her that the parking lot would have a say in whether the street could be closed. “I actually thought it was more of a city decision than [the parking lot’s] decision about how the street was used,” she said. “And I didn’t realize people owned curb cuts, but I don’t work for the DOT.”

The DOT did not respond to questions about its position on the parking lot’s latest complaint.

As for the rejection of a Play Street, “We are very, very disappointed,” PTA  co-president Emily Hellstrom said, noting the amount of groundwork that went into the application.

“Before the school year ended we did a lot of ground work, talking to Community Board 1 and various business stakeholders and other stakeholders in the neighborhood. We talked to everyone and it came out on our side,” Hellstrom said.

She added: “When we use the street they use the other entrance-exit [on Pearl Street] and for whatever reason they said that having it closed three more hours was going to be a burden.” (The original application actually calls for closing the street from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., five more hours, though the school said it would compromise by closing the street at 7:30 a.m. and opening it at 3:30 p.m.) “I don’t want to damage someone’s livelihood. But there’s a perfectly good other exit and it’s just not that much to ask.”

Siena has painted a dire picture of what limited play space will mean for the school in the future. Already beyond outdoor play capacity during its first year with 270 students, she said she expects the school to grow to about 750, though it could be more.

“It’s impossible to accommodate all our students on the roof for lunch and recess in a timely way,” Siena told Community Board 1 during her pitch for Play Street approval last June. “We’ve experimented with how many kids we can have up there safely playing, and we found that 125 is really the number.” In the noisy gym, she said, “there are some kids who can tune it out, but for others the racket is overstimulating.”

In June, a DOE spokesman said the agency “encourages” principals to provide elementary school students with at least 20 minutes per day of outdoor recess. While the city’s health code does not say what constitutes adequate space, it does say that “all well children shall have a daily period of outdoor play, except during inclement weather.”

The city Department of Education did not respond to questions about the rejection of a Play Street for Peck Slip School students.